It’s amazing just how complicit the whole music industry is in the myth that 24bit audio inherently ‘sounds better’ than 16bit. Lets bust a few myths… 16 bit audio can represent 96db of dynamic range. 24bit audio can represent 144db. The human ear can detect 120db of dynamic range, and this where the problems start, and maybe the myth and legend begins. First, we ned to differentiate the difference between bit depth and sample rate, a common misconception. We are talking here about bit depth on playback, not sample rate 44.1/96kHz etc. which is another topic. There are also very good reasons why you want the full dynamic range that 24bits offers in recording. That’s not what is being discussed here. We are talking about playback i.e. how people will hear your music.

So 96db isn’t ‘quite’ enough to represent the full detectable range of the human ear. We need something better right? Well not really…. If the music you listened to was represented with a 120db range it would literally take you from the quietest perceptible noise in a silent room up to the threshold of pain.. In other words you’d quickly do irreparable hearing damage and probably receive a noise nuisance order from your local council. This is assuming of course that you had a hifi setup that could represent sound to the threshold of pain and it was placed in a completely silent room.

The closest musically we can get to that, is the experience of a live 120 piece orchestra, but even then, the noise floor in the concert hall would be well above the threshold of hearing. The other caveat here is all that dynamic range would have to be recorded… And in any commercially released music, dynamic range (DR) is limited.

Most commercial pop/ rock recordings have a DR of no more than 10db…. Yep you read that right just 10db. (between RMS average and peak). Tell me again that you need all the dynamic range that 24bit offers…

For techy folks with a DAW you can do this trick.. Bounce your favourite 24bit audio track to a file and then another file at 16bit (same sample rate). Import them into your DAW, invert one file and sum them. They will almost certainly cancel out… In other words there is no mathematical difference, let along anything you can hear.

So yes in theory 24 bit is better….In practice there are limitations that make the benefit of that theory entirely inaccessible. So why do we issue audio in 24bit at all? Well it comes back to the initial disclaimer that recording 24bit gives us a lower noise floor and more dynamic range to work with in mixing digital audio. There is a clear benefit there. And why would you want to convert the audio to 16bit when it’s already there in 24bit. It’s just an added unnecessary conversion process. We still need 16 bit for CD and for some reason digital distributors like CDBaby still insist on 16 bit files… As for everywhere else, 24 bit is the standard. Does it sound better than 16bit.. Nope..

The other reason of course is marketing…